WHAT: Amy Stewart, a New York Times bestselling author who writes about the perils and pleasures of the natural world, will deliver a public presentation, “A Wicked Evening with Amy Stewart” on Friday, May 11, 2012 at 6:30 p.m.

ABOUT AMY STEWARTStewart is the inaugural Tin House Writer-in-Residence at Portland State University this spring, a partnership between PSU’s MFA program in creative writing and the Portland-based publishing enterprise Tin House (http://www.tinhouse.com).

Stewart is author of three New York Times bestsellers: Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers; Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities; and, most recently, Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army and Other Diabolical Insects. Her next book, The Drunken Botanist (2013) reveals “the dizzying array of plants that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol”.

She has written for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and every national garden magazine, includingFine Gardening, where she is a contributing editor.

Stewart is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the American Horticulture Society's Book Award, and a California Horticultural Society Writer's Award. Stewart lives in Eureka, California, with her husband Scott Brown, where they own an antiquarian bookstore.